At Home by Sarah Butler

I have been spending a lot of time at home.

Even before Covid-19. It turns out looking after two small children restricts your movements somewhat.

Home is 'one of the most loaded words in the English dictionary'[1] writes Linda McDowell. Want to stay here, want to run away. Love it, hate it. Anchored. Trapped.

Stay at home. But it’s not always that simple.

Because it’s not just your delivery address, is it? The street. The neighbourhood. The city. The country. The EU – let's not even start on that. The planet – nor that. Your friends. Family. The way the sun catches the leaves of the Acer tree across the road.

 In my late twenties I bought and refurbished a house with my long-term partner. Turned out he was having an affair. I remember the moment he told me – sitting on our brand-new sofa (brown leather, cream stitching), everything suddenly broken. I stood and walked into the garden, but I still couldn’t breathe – my home revealed as a fake. All that love. All that time. All those plans. This was London. I’d moved reluctantly, resistant to this huge, hungry, rush-about city. I figured I’d leave, except it turned out I didn’t want to. The city held me. I’d lost the place I called home (and the man I thought of as a kind of home) yet here were all these islands, strung together, sofas and spare rooms, cups of tea and bottles of wine, phone calls and park meets, galleries and city streets. I belonged in a way I hadn’t realised. I cared in a way I hadn’t expected.

I’d been lucky up until that point – I had experienced home as a fixed, safe, seemingly permanent space; when for so many it is a place of danger, oppression and pain.

What I learnt: home can be lost, and found again. Home is an act of creation – an ongoing process of making. Home can exist both inside a building and outside of it, in our actions, our stories, a smile, a wave, a rainbow in the window, a meal, a cup of tea, weeding the garden, lying in the park, buying the same things in the same shops, over and again. We repeat. We remember. We retell. We make and remake and remake again.

Home is 'both a place and an attitude' (Judith Flanders);[2] ‘an emotional space’ (Roberta Rubenstein);[3] a 'spatial imaginary' (Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling).[4]

I have been learning the names of the animals on my street. Pablo (cat). Iris (cat). Boo (dog).

I have bought two houses in my life. The one I lost and the one I now live in. I refurbished both of them. Stripping wallpaper. Filling cracks. Painting walls and wood. Choosing kitchen doors and bathroom suites. They are the two places I have known most intimately in my life.

We sit on our front doorstep and drink tea, or gin, depending on the time of day and the type of day. We chat to passers-by.  Our toddler waters the plants. He picks up gravel and drops it into the watering can. He looks for bees.

When we moved in we drew a map of the street. Every time we worked out what a neighbour was called we added their name to the map. So we wouldn’t forget. So we wouldn’t have to ask again.

Last year, locked out of my house, pouring rain, screaming baby, I realised there were six doors I could knock on to ask for help. Maybe eight.

Two small children make a walk down the road an adventure. My toddler wants to know the names of all the plants and flowers. I do my best for a while, then download an app. ‘Need to look up it,’ he tells me and we get my phone, take a photo, press search. Jupiter’s Beard. Bird’s Eye. Saxifrage. Euphorbia. There is comfort in knowing the names of things.

The cactus in our bathroom was given to us by the woman who used to live across the road. The roses in our front garden are from another neighbour’s garden. The magnolia – which blooms an extravagant purple-pink each spring – was my birthday present. This year I saw a woman stop in front of it to have her photo taken.

When my second child was born we arrived home late in the evening. My mum was here, looking after our eldest. ‘Make sure you look out of your window,’ she said as she left. I took our tiny baby daughter up to the bedroom and lifted back the curtains. Our opposite neighbours had written ‘Welcome Amber’ in their window, cut-out letters curved around a golden sun.

‘Space is practiced place’[5], writes Michel de Certeau. There are the places we are presented with – houses, streets, parks, cities – and the spaces we turn them into, by living, by acting, by telling stories.

I have been collecting stories about my street. A house lost in a card game. An old hospital, now flats. A tennis court now a bungalow. A couple walking along the brook after chapel in the 1880s. Fox cubs sliding down a kids’ slide. A woman asking the council for the trees that now line the street, pushing their roots against the tarmac.

Tomorrow we are viewing a new house. I want to live there. I can’t bear the thought of leaving here. It needs totally refurbishing. We might not be able to afford it.

We make our homes. Over and again. We turn them into spaces through our bodies and our words. We change with them and they change with us. Nothing is forever.

[1] Linda McDowell, ‘Home, Place and Identity’, in Gender,  Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 71–95 (p. 71).

[2] Judith Flanders, The Making Of Home (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), p. 3.

[3] Roberta Rubenstein, Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostlagia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 1.

[4] Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.

[5] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 117.